DocViewer Comment boxes TOO big!

[uribes]

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

As part of the formative assessment cycle, I leave comments on my students' work and ask them to "comment back" to me using the "Reply" feature. This worked great with Crocodoc; however, with the new DocViewer, the boxes are very large, even when there isn't a lot of text. This causes comments to take up a ton of space, which means that comments often do not appear next to the part of the assignment in question. They will end up way down the page, making it hard for students to track the comments, and reply to my prompts/questions. Also, as the comment boxes expand with student replies, they cover one another and sometimes the boxes behind cannot be viewed. Students have expressed frustration regarding inability to view all comments, and the only way for them to view the boxes underneath is for me to move the comments around. When I move comments, they no longer point to the part of the assignment that has to be fixed. Please help! docviewer, submission feedback

Comments from Instructure

Please see Canvas Release: Canvas DocViewer  for updates

Please also see Canvas Beta Release Notes (2017-10-16) 

Additional work has been completed in Canvas Beta Release Notes (2018-04-30) & https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-14650-canvas-beta-release-notes-2018-05-21 

[erinhmcmillan]

Hi, Scott,

The initial request for the idea has been completed as the previous versions of the comments were much larger. Our product team minimized that space but wants to continue to enhance this functionality, and with each enhancement we'll add comments linking to the release notes for reference. The team isn't quite finished yet, so additional comments will be added here in a future release as well. Thanks!

Erin

[mbizer]

Sorry, but as far as I'm concerned, the comment boxes are still too large, and they don't change size when one zooms in and out of a document.

[s_mccracken]

Why has an icon been added to the annotation boxes? I am not sure how the icon is useful; an icon isn't necessary to distinguish between the different types of annotation that have been used. The icon just wastes more space.

Here are some images to illustrate the amount of wasted space in the the annotation boxes:

Here is how the boxes look now:

Here I have removed the icon and moved the text to show just how much wasted space there is:

Even if you keep the icon, there is still a lot of wasted space:

(By the way, please ignore my typo in the screenshot!)

[beerline_n]

Scott,

This is a great illustration of this issue. I will also add that the [...], which students must click to access, actually discourages students from doing so. Also, sometimes the [...] will not open up. I have seen this happen repeatedly for students and myself. We could have far fewer [...] if the comment space was used more wisely.

Nora

[erinhmcmillan]

Hi, all,

Additional enhancements to comments are still forthcoming and will be announced in a future release.

Thanks!

Erin

[Renee_Carney]

The additional work is here!  Check it out in https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-14552-canvas-beta-release-notes-2018-04-30 

[Renee_Carney]

The changes originally mentioned in the beta notes above have been retracted, but keep following this idea to receive updates as they are available.  We expect this to return to beta in a near release.

[Renee_Carney]

Thanks for following this thread.  As promised, here's the update...  https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-14650-canvas-beta-release-notes-2018-05-21 

[Renee_Carney]

https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-14712-canvas-production-release-notes-2018-06-02